your dirty mouth full of honest lies
by vega-de-la-lyre
Summary: It would be rather funny, Bridget thinks to herself, if it were not all so wretchedly sad, if her fans could see what she is reduced to now. Hicox/von Hammersmark, AU.


It would be rather funny, Bridget thinks to herself, if it were not all so wretchedly sad, if her fans could see what she is reduced to now. Her flat, once one of the best in the city, now isn't fit for a squatter to stay the night; her building is now smoke-blackened and shell-damaged, half its windows missing, the attic caved in. She hasn't enough food to keep alive a cat, her clothes – what's left of them, anyway – are threadbare and sparse, and her famous yellow hair is greasy and unset.

Bridget lights a cigarette with shockingly steady hands and surveys her room. "Good God," she says aloud to the wreckage.

She should not have come back to Berlin. She knows this now. And it's not that she even had to; she rode out what was left of the war in relative comfort and peace in the French countryside, she could have stayed on there, made her living in French cinema rather than German. She did not have to come back to this weary, jaded, battle-scarred ruin of a city, this beaten-down beast that was once her home. Her throat closes up with grief, and she braces her fingers against her forehead. She cannot think of it all, now. It hurts too much. Later; she will think of it later.

Her door creaks open. Bridget immediately claps a hand to her waist, where she has kept a hard-won Luger for the past two months. But before she has a chance to even draw it she recognises the figure silhouetted in the doorway, and she thinks she might be sick.

"Oh," she says, the syllable startled unbidden from her lungs, more an exhalation than anything else. Her hand drops to her side, and he steps into the light.

"But you're dead," Bridget says.

"Not quite," Hicox says. She can see a half-healed bullet track scored through the flesh of his face deep into his hairline, and when he slowly comes forward into the room she notes that he is limping heavily. A limp to match her own, she thinks. "It was, I will admit, a close thing, however."

They left him behind, she realises with a growing horror. Alive, and they left him behind.

"We were in rather a hurry," she says around the guilt that tastes of ash on her tongue. It is a poor excuse. "The theatre, you know."

"So I heard," he says. His smile is tight and brief. "Well-done."

She casts around for something else to say, but everything she seizes on sounds hollow and lame. "I'm sorry," she says finally.

Hicox shakes his head. "No," he says. "We don't have time for that, and frankly, I don't much have the stomach for it at the moment."

She takes a drag from her cigarette, keenly aware of how she looks right now. Stupidly, she thinks she would kill someone for a tube of lipstick at the moment.

"Then why are you here?"

"There's still work to be done," he says.

She swallows and sits down hard on her bed. She casts around momentarily for an ashtray and then, coming to her senses, simply stubs her cigarette out on the filthy floor.

"Me," she says. "You still want me?"

"What I want," Hicox says, back rigid, standing firmly to attention, "has nothing to do with it."

"You don't trust me," Bridget says sharply. "Listen, I've been over this, with your American colleagues. What happened at that tavern was none of my doing –"

Hicox tilts his head. "I've talked with them," he says. "I've heard your version of events. I am as yet, undecided, but that's neither here nor there. My superiors want you. I am to fetch you."

Bridget tightens her lips.

Suddenly, with a squeal of metal-on-metal her bedframe violently collapses, throwing up a cloud of dust. Bridget, trapped in a jumble of blankets, throws her head back and laughs after a short second of startled confusion. Hicox, after all, is one of her biggest fans, and, oh God, just _look_ at her.

Hicox is standing over her like he does not get the joke. "Frau von Hammersmark," he says over her laughter, his voice perfectly level, pale eyes grave. "It really won't do, you know, for you to be laying around on the job. We have places to be. If you're willing, that is."

Bridget manages to subdue her giddy hilarity, for the moment, at least. She gives him a lazy grin and offers him her hand. "Do help a lady up, then," she says, and with a quirk of his eyebrow he takes it.


End file.
